Artist and writer Paul Hornschemeier creates bold cartoons about subtle ideas. His comics boast decisive lines and arresting colors, but they’re generally about things that are hard to depict, describe or understand, like loneliness, melancholy and ennui.

Hornschemeier’s newest graphic novel is called “Life with Mr. Dangerous” (Villard). It’s about a young woman facing her 26th birthday while drifting through her love life and her dead-end job at a clothing store.

Hornschemeier’s previous books include “Mother, Come Home” (Dark Horse Comics, 2003) and “The Three Paradoxes” (Fantagraphics Books, 2006). [Hornschemeier has worked for Speakeasy, and for me, before. Check out examples here and here.]

Speakeasy talked to Hornschemeier about his work via email.

Why did you think this story was best told as a comic instead of as a traditional novel?

Paul Hornschemeier: The story weaves in and out of future and past fantasies as well as skewing the present, and I thought comics would allow for each of those mindsets to have their own aesthetic more so than prose.

What kinds of things can comics do that text novels can’t?

I think that comics offer a unique potential for mapping the way we experience time and our lives. We travel nonlinearly, hopping from fantasy to memory to reality… and comics provide a perfect cartography for that.

What made you feel confident, as a male author, that you could get inside of the head of a female protagonist?

Mainly growing up with my two sisters and my mother being the bread winner of the household. Women were the dominant voice of my childhood, so speaking in that voice seemed as accessible to me as my other characters that pull from other parts of my life.

How do you go about creating your comics? Do the images or the words come to you first?

I tend to write far more than I draw, I may have an image pop into my head, but those are usually just isolated points of inspiration: from there the writing takes over.

How do you feel you expanded the limits of your art in this work?

With some of my previous books, I think they focused more tightly on a single emotional space, so with this story, I was looking to open things up more, allow in more humor and a bit more of life’s messiness.

What are you working on next?

I’m working on a few graphic novels – a couple which I’m writing and other people are drawing – and some screenwriting projects. Mainly, I’m not getting sleep, as usual.